The Heap, Sean Adams
The Heap, Sean Adams
414 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

The Heap
A Novel

Author: Sean Adams

Narrator: David Sadzin, Allyson Ryan, Sarah Naughton, Todd Haberkorn

Unabridged: 9 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/07/2020


Synopsis

“As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut, The Heap is both a hilarious send-up of life under late capitalism and a moving exploration of the peculiar loneliness of the early 21st century. A masterful and humane gem of a novel.” —Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of MonstersBlending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise.
Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building’s mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land.Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show.The brothers’ conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station’s parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as “he” converses with Bernard.What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.

About Sean Adams

Sean Adams is the author of The Heap. He is a graduate of Bennington College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Normal School, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa, with his wife, Emma, and their various pets.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Terry

Personally, I loved this book. Loved it enough that I read it twice, the second time intentionally slow, because I wanted to give it a decent yet fair review. This is a novel, that won't be for everyone across the board, and I believe most readers will either love it or hate it. Sean Adams has used s......more

Goodreads review by Joe

Random thoughts on The Heap, by Sean Adams: - Los Verticales is a unique experiment in living - a city that is built up rather than out. Everyone lives in an ever-expanding high-rise that also contains workplaces (actual companies), parks, restaurants, gyms, services, etc. Basically, no one ever leav......more

Goodreads review by Shannon

You can find the full review and all the fancy and/or randomness that accompanies it at It Starts at Midnight . 3.5* So, this book went in a very different direction that I assumed it would. To be fair, I don't necessarily always have any decent grasp on where I think things are headed, so we won't h......more

NOTE: I won this arc as part of a goodreads giveaway. It in no means influences my review. The premise of this book, which pulled me in, was also what left me a bit disappointed. The characters' development throughout left me wanting a bit more. Orville had the most development, with the other charac......more

Goodreads review by Jane

I was amused by this satiric, surrealistic story about an experiment in urban planning called Los Verticalés, a condominium tower which stands 500 stories tall in an unnamed desert…. until it doesn’t, having collapsed into The Heap. The only survivors are The Displaced Travellers, those residents wh......more